Autour de la Lune

Last updated
Autour de la Lune
Biosphere - Autour de la Lune.jpg
Studio album by
Released17 May 2004
Genre
Length74:23
Label Touch Records
Biosphere chronology
Shenzhou
(2002)
Autour de la Lune
(2004)
Dropsonde
(2006)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar half.svgStar empty.svgStar empty.svg [1]
Pitchfork 7.8/10 [2]

Autour de la Lune is an album by ambient musician Biosphere which was released on 17 May 2004. The album presents a striking difference from others in the Biosphere catalog due to its percussionless, minimalistic soundscapes consisting mostly of white noise and the sounds of the Mir space station, related to drone music. It featured cover art by the Norwegian contemporary artist Tor-Magnus Lundeby.

Contents

Overview

Autour de la Lune stands as the most minimal and austere Biosphere album to date. The drones employed on this album are comparable to Coil's 1998 album Time Machines in their timbre and slow rate of change.

The bulk of this work was originally commissioned and broadcast in September 2003 by Radio France Culture for a musical evocation of Jules Verne. As a book, Autour de la Lune (1870, Around the Moon ) was Jules Verne's sequel to his De la Terre à la Lune (1865, From the Earth to the Moon ). The first one dealt with the Earth part of the story until the ship's launching, from the outside. Autour de la Lune dealt from the inside of the ship with the launching and the actual space travel to and around the moon.

Track listing

  1. "Translation" – 21:43
  2. "Rotation" – 11:08
  3. "Modifié" – 5:10
  4. "Vibratoire" – 3:36
  5. "Déviation" – 10:26
  6. "Circulaire" – 6:15
  7. "Disparu" – 2:26
  8. "Inverse" – 5:32
  9. "Tombant" – 8:07

The album's titles are French for "Translation", "Rotation", "Modified", "Vibratory", "Deviation", "Circular", "Vanished", "Reverse", "Falling", and evoke the movements of a rocket around the moon and back.

Track 3 consists of (among other sounds) a ring modulation of Sigur Rós' "Ný batterí". [3]

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Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.

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<i>From the Earth to the Moon</i> 1865 novel by Jules Verne

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References

  1. https://www.allmusic.com/album/r697030
  2. Richardson, Mark (2004-07-07). "Album Reviews: Biosphere: Autour de la Lune". Pitchfork. Retrieved 2013-06-09.
  3. https://www.discogs.com/release/265956-Biosphere-Autour-De-La-Lune